By Eric Ellington Agyedenah
Father’s Day always come with a feeling that I do not have the right words to explain clearly.
It is a kind of mixed feeling for me. I do know that Father’s Day was first celebrated in June 19, 1910, in Spokane, Washington, when Sonora Smart Dodd wanted to honor her father after listening to a Mother’s Day sermon.
However, I got to know about the celebration of Father’s Day after I have lost my father. My father is Atampugre Ageedenah of Zuarungu – Zonno and I never got the opportunity to celebrate my father until he passed on thirty six years ago.
I was young when he passed on and I never knew there was any day set aside to celebrate fathers.
Even if I knew, I had no resources then to honor my father but just kneeling in front of him to thank him for the fatherly role he played in my life would have satisfied my soul.
I feel sad that I am now celebrating my father when he is no more. I did not get the opportunity to spend so much time with him to know him more, learn so much from him and celebrate him.
However, the little time I spent with him, I knew he had a lot to offer. I wish he had lived longer. He was never celebrated as I wish he was.
Looking back, I have come to appreciate the fact that he had sacrificed so much for us. We are even still reaping some of the fruits from the seeds he sowed. My father did so much for us. He did his best for us.
Even if he did not meet our expectations, it was the best he could do under the circumstances and to the best of his abilities. He did so much but got no celebration while he was alive. I believe this story is not only exclusive to my father alone but many other fathers globally have and continue to do much but got less or no celebration. In my subsequent paragraphs, I would want to talk about the many things fathers do but which are unfortunately or deliberately taken for granted and not celebrated.
Like Atampugre, many fathers have suffered various pains and taken various high risks to create a decent life for their families, many times enduring their pains and sufferings silently.
For most of these fathers, their efforts are not appreciated, let alone to be celebrated. Many fathers work long hours on many jobs to put food on the table, give the family shelter, cloth the family, provide medical care and many others. They leave early in the morning when their families are asleep and came back late when they are asleep, not because they like it but out of necessity for the family to survive.
Many travel far away from their families where the opportunities exist so they can work and create a decent life for their families. Many times their children grow up without understanding the context, brand their fathers as absentee fathers. Meanwhile all this while these fathers took those decisions to give their families a decent life, only to win the prize of the best absentee father. Very unfortunate and disturbing but a reality many fathers have faced, many are facing now and many will face in the future.
Fathers have been told that they are the heads of their families and that comes with a responsibility, a responsibility to provide for the needs of their families. Fathers must provide the money to put food on the table in the morning, afternoon and evening, provide clothes, accommodation, pay school fees, pay for transportation to school and back, provide money for Medicare, pay for extra tuition, provide gadgets for entertainment in the house include TV set and all the other electronic gadgets for cooking and preserving food, pay all other bills including water, electricity and internet bills among many others.
In this new information and technological age, family needs have increased and have become complex.
Family basic needs used to be just three that is food, shelter and clothing. All this have changed in our globally village today thereby burdening fathers the more.
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This is even made more complex with social media providing platforms for people to artificially and pretentiously create an impression about how they are making it and enjoying life and further putting pressure on fathers to provide same for their families.
At the end of the day, if the hard work of fathers are not able to provide these lifestyles, their efforts are greeted with uncaring and irresponsibility. To avoid being tagged as uncaring and irresponsible, many fathers have done dubious things to provide false life to their families. Some of these dubious things have landed some fathers in jail. Others have lost their families too because they could not meet their demands. Unsatisfied wives have packed and left the house and marriage with the children leaving the fathers alone.
After going through the things fathers go through, fathers better understand the workings of the world and life in general. As a result, fathers always want to prepare their children for the life ahead of them. Fathers become instruments of mentorship, discipline and corrections in order to prepare the children adequately for life challenges ahead of them.
These discipline or corrective actions are not punishments but a way to help children build life skills and resilience for the life in the world outside. However, many children see them as punishment and hatred for them by their fathers. They grow up with that mentality and decided to have nothing to do with their fathers. Fathers will insist that the family culture, values and life philosophies carefully created over the ages and handed over to them from previous generations are instilled in their children and are preserved for future generations to benefit too. For example in my family, the culture of respect for the elders, the values of love and unity and the life philosophy of showing leadership and working hard have all been passed on from one generation to the other. You will face disciplinary action if you disrespect an elder including elder siblings in my family.
Fathers enforce these and it makes fathers unpopular with the children sometimes but fatherhood responsibilities are not for popularity, they are for shaping and empowering children to impact their generation.
Fathers are not only entrusted with the responsibility to be providers of material and physical things but added to their responsibilities is the spiritual head of the family. I grew up with a father who practiced the African traditional religion with the worship of ancestors. When things are not going the way they should go including when a child is sick, he would wake up early in the morning to go for consultations with the ancestors.
He will come back with the message of whatever he was directed to do, which many times involves animal sacrifices, and find the animals or money to buy the animals to sacrifice. The story is not different from Christian and other religions fathers.
Fathers pray, fast, sow seeds, give thanksgiving offerings and make vows for the wellbeing of their families. These spiritual duties are not physical or material things so they are glossed over by the children but they really drain fathers and give families stability.
The creator of the universe is called Father. Fathers are creators including creators of destinies. Many years ago, David defied world theories of guerrilla fights. He was young with little to no experience in wars but elected himself to fight the most terror and feared enemy of Israel when trained soldiers equipped with weapons of war could not dare.
Against advice and intimidation, he went forward and fought experienced Goliath and killed him to the shock of the whole of the world.
We are told in the Bible that as soon as David returned from killing Goliath, Abner took him to the King. The first question King Saul asked him in 1 Samuel 17:58 is “Tell me about your father, young man.”
Part of the father resides in the children enabling them to do marvelous and great things but many time children take it for granted. I have received so much favors from people because of my father’s good will. Good will is as good as any physical property. Jesus confirmed that part of the father resides in children and enables them to do the things they do. In John 5:19 Jesus said “Truly, truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son also does.”
Many children denigrate their fathers by accusing them that they have not done anything for them, mostly referring to physical or material things and ignoring the spiritual things fathers do for them. Waking up and watching your father do the things he does is even a blessing on its own because it has the effect of influencing whatever you will also do in future.
It is Father’s Day and every one of us has a father. I know that many of us are angry with our fathers, maybe because of what someone has told us about them or material or physical things we expected him to do for us that he did not do or do it adequately.
Under normal circumstances, no father will withhold any good thing from his children but sometimes many things are beyond the father’s reach. As a result, many children erroneously interpret that to mean the fathers are being mean to them or irresponsible towards them. Historically, blessings for children has always been the father’s blessing and this is the blessing that makes the difference in children’s life. None matter what we have been told about our fathers or whatever they have done, we still need them in our lives. This year’s Father’s Day is an opportunity for us to make peace with our fathers, dead or alive.
I do not know who needs to hear this, but we all need to make peace with our fathers whether dead or alive. Forgive where you have to forgive. Apologize where you have to apologize. Honor where you have to honor. And celebrate where you have to celebrate. Fathers have done so much for us so let us celebrate them greatly. Happy Father’s Day to all fathers.